XLHC
by AgnosticAngel
Summary: In 2018 physics has advanced to the verge of clean, limitless energy- Antimatter. Scientists have created the largest experiment in the world, spanning the whole planet. The XLHC is supposed to save the world, but... You know the rest...


**X****L****H****C:**

Exhaustedly, the bored security guard poured his coffee. The 18 hour shifts were killing him slowly. Spying one of the many paper-thin OLCD monitors, he saw the time: 13:58 12/05/08. Looking at the huge array of monitors he reminisced of a film he once saw, a classic, from a hundred years ago. An ancient batman film, there was a scene with a roomful of screens showing footage all over the city. Smirking at the pathetic technology, he went back to his job, staring into the centre of the monitors, scanning for movement from the corner of his eye. The samey-coloured tube went through all tones of green, each sector of monitor labelled with the exact wavelength value for each tone, making it easy to track and isolate sections. A flicker caught his eye- moving straight to section 555 a mind-numbing sight befell him: Nothing. Groaning at the constant lack of excitement, he continued sipping his tea.

"Attention to all security staff. We are commencing activation of the Bracken Antimatter Generation initial run. Please take extra care in ignoring observational windows; and remember your jobs." He sighed. Thinking of the rich, intelligent minds working above him in the control rooms made him feel smaller than the particles they were smashing. Seventy grand bought him a rudimentary living, nothing more. No time for a wife, not even for whores, and with the hyperinflation crisis escalating his pay could barely sustain his rent. Not that he used his house much. A rhythmic clicking snapped him out of his daze. He realized it had been going on for a while, and it was getting faster exponentially. The Geiger counter in his watch- it was warning him. Seeing nothing in the cavernous security room, he fearfully searched for signs of a leak, praying the watch was malfunctioning. The clicks merged into a single low rumble at this point, whatever was preying on him near its quarry. With a half-formed scream, Martin Thompson ceased to exist.

Flipping from the thunderous vortex into the comparably ambient tunnel brought on a groan of protest from the engine, still going strong after years of materialisations. The Doctor poked his head out, jumping straight into the action as always, and frowned slightly. They were in a tunnel, stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions. A vibrant green tube ran along the side, and twin metal rails protruded from the concrete floor. A subtle humming pervaded the otherwise silent tunnel, The Doctor calling to Amy.

"Amy! This place is amazing! Look! Quick!" Amy hurried out excitedly. "Lol jk its a tunnel." Amy groaned and hit the Time Lord on the back of the head playfully.

"I never should have shown you FaceBook," she frowned, "why are we here?"

"2108. Humanity learns how to safely produce sustained annihilation reactions with antimatter. And _this,_" He threw his arms wide, "Is the XLHC. Extra Large Hadron Collider. To be specific it's actually the third large collider built, so technically it's the extra-extra Large Hadron Collider. Supersise, if you will. It spans... the whole planet, hundreds of metres deep, straight through the crust of Earth, over 24 _thousand_ metres long, accelerating particles to over _900%_ of the speed of light."

Amy brushed away the nerdy talk hastily, interjecting "What are we doing in a tunnel?"

"This is the best bit, we get to watch the particles before the main event!" He inspected the tunnel, looking up and down the length. "An observation window! Great! Look, Amy!"

Amy strolled over to see a thick exo-glass panel embedded in the green tube. It seemingly had nothing interesting inside, a few pulsing ripples of air and two glowing thin blurs, gradually getting closer. Glancing at the readings on a series of dials and digital graphs, The Doctor's expression changed from one of fascination to urgent alarm. Withdrawing his screwdriver, he ordered: "Amy, get in the TARDIS now! Get the electromagnetic amplifier, the wire box and my red contacts!" She noticed the deathly serious tone his voice held and rushed off to get the supplies. Frantically holding the sonic screwdriver against a panel, he called in "If you're going to be more than 30 seconds, stay inside and lock the door, and hope there's an Earth left when you open it!" Amy bundled out with the tools, and The Doctor instantly set upon creating a complex machine, slotting the contact lens on the end of the screwdriver, plugging in a conical amplifier tool to the side, and fixing several wires in a tangled mess about the connections. The beams inside the tube were almost touching now, seconds from collision. As they were a fraction of a nanometre away, seemingly merged on their opposing paths, an ear-splitting buzz emitted from the screwdriver, a blinding red beam piercing through into the control panel. The deadlocked control system forcibly fell apart, and the lights dimmed in the facility; the humming collider whirring down and the beam inside halting instantaneously; a dull crunch echoing in the distance.

"What the hell did you do?" Amy exclaimed once her eyes readjusted to the darkness, a duller backup light illuminating their faces.

"May 12, 2108. Initial mass antimatter creation in the XLHC. Critical system failure causes overload, the machine shutting down before destroying half the planet. Unknown failure causes massive surge, potentially causing the entire XLHC to invert to antimatter, essentially blowing the Earth to oblivion. Even after deactivation under mysterious circumstances, the particles at such speed collided brutally under the pacific, the housing tunnel rupturing from the force, flooding the facility for years." A faint roar of liquid rage flowed in the distance.

"How long does water take to get this far?" Amy was a little scared even near the TARDIS.

"Two minutes at most. We-" A buzz cut him off. Starting quietly, The Doctor moved his head to listen to the rail, an electromagnetic current flowing through; leaving his hair on end slightly. It eventually overcame the tidal roar, from the same direction. A glinting silver diamond flashed in the distance, getting nearer and nearer. "Thats funny..." The Doctor said, oblivious to the oncoming cart. He reached up to a section of wall and pulled a small, postcard-sized piece from it to reveal a camera. The minute screen showed the identical section of tube, seemingly on a video loo. Before he could begin to explain to Amy his hypothesis of the situation, let alone stow it in his coat, the cart whisked them off their feet, a gravity repulsion device cushioning their arrival on the hi-tech cart.

"My ship! Wait! Take us back!" The lanky Time Lord yelled in surprise.

"Everything here is drowning, no way are we going back there," A man in a lab coat spoke. As The Doctor started to fiddle with the holding mechanism he stopped abruptly, seeing the torrent of water surging towards the cart. All of a sudden the energy of the water stopped; its driving force cut off: Emergency bulkheads were descending. They were spaced fairly far-between, the intense velocity of the cart only passing one every few dozen seconds. It was a silver plate, about 8 foot long and 4 wide. It ran on the tracks on the floor, pulled by the magnetism and using it as a power source for the seats, which were more like bent force fields- They only existed when one was on the cart, taking their shape for maximum stability. A holographic display hovered on the side, a map of the compound. A large ring with several cubic fixtures along it. The pulsing dot marked their location, right next to one of the cubes. It began to slow, a bulkhead whisking over their heads.

"Duck!" The lab coat man said. It couldn't have come sooner. Amy's head was almost knocked off by the sturdy concrete wall, had she not obeyed fast. The cart all of a sudden stopped still, a lot smoother than the speed should reasonably allow. "Get in the hatch" He cried after hopping out. He clambered up the ladder, The Doctor right behind. "Damn! Deadlocked!" He groaned, "we'll be here a while."

"Try this!" The Doctor pointed the souped-up screwdriver at the concrete circle with a wheel in the centre t open. Retro designs never got old. With another crimson flash and a buzz, the circular door echoed a crack from within, signalling the opening. "The booster I added forces the lock remotely. I never liked it but sometimes it's useful." The hatch swung open and the man in the lab coat, Amy, and The Doctor clambered up. The little remaining water gathered around the floor, now far below them; and was closed off, the area closing with a bang as abrasively, the heavy hatch swung shut again.

Coming out of the hole, they followed the man in the lab coat to a chrome elevator, the doors becoming them in. After a few seconds they walked out again, to the amazement of Amy.

"Nothing like Mass Effect, eh?" She laughed.

"Sorry, what? Oh; where are my manners," The man smiled in a faint American accent, "I'm Sam. I work in engineering; I was moving down to the base when the tube ruptured. It's lucky I was going this way, or the wave would have got me. How did you guys get down here?"

"Oh, I'm Doctor John Smith, Ph.D." He held his psychic paper up. "This is my assistant, Amy Pond, MPhys. We were investigating the structural stability of the collider. At the moment your rating is an E plus. Try to do better in future or you'll be shut down."

This joke seemed to have a serious effect on Sam and he nervously led them through a set of double-doors to a grand control room. Computers lined the desks and the circumference of the huge cylindrical hall was completely covered in readouts from the key screens. Output graphs, facility status memos, and nanosecond-timelines lay around the single wall, all trying to work out what caused the overload, and then the rupture. A piece of video footage then fell on a large arc of the wall: A dark-haired man in a coat pulling a small screen from the camera, next to a good-looking ginger girl, before being whisked away by a cart. Immediately, following this warning, The Doctor jumped up on a nearby white desk with his hands in the air.

"It's me," He surrendered; taking the still looping screen from his pocket, his psychic paper in the other hand. "I'm an inspector. This was not mine. There is a small camera inside, whoever is behind the disaster is watching right now. Whoever wanted to blow up a good portion of your solar system... I stopped the matter colliding with Petymann threshold energy, unless I intervened it would surge out until the nearest matter, that is, the collider itself, was hit. As a wave function it would cause the entire tube to simultaneously radiate positrons until they themselves became antimatter, annihilating and tearing the world apart. Be thankful you have a broken bit of tunnel." The clamour of voices quietened while he spoke, and a short, elegant woman in the centre of the room spoke out, her authority noted by the others. The Doctor spotted her name tag- Ellen Bracken. She led the antimatter generation project, according to the news snippet he read from 2108.

She casually strolled over, and they couldn't see the fusion gun she held until she was within firing range. The setting flicked from safety to stun to maim to kill, and she aimed it at the two companions.


End file.
